MAY 7 (Sat.) – 7pm and 9pm
MAY 8 (Sun.) – 2pm, 7pm and 9pm
FESTIVAL OF IDEAS FOR THE NEW CITY
New American Cinema Group, Inc. and The Film-Makers’ Cooperative in collaboration with the Millennium Film Workshop
“The Urban Landscape in Cinematic Transformation”
STORYTELLING & LOCAL HISTORY: An avant-garde film series interweaves three threads pertinent to the East Village, Chinatown, and Lower East Side: the urban landscape, subcultures that inhabit them, and changes over time.
The Urban Landscape in Cinematic Transformation will feature films that show the changing urban landscape and the people who inhabit it, from the late 1950s to today. The FMC will be collaborating with The Millennium Workshop on this special focus showcase. The four programs will take place over two days, with one program of shorts and one feature on each day. SHORTS will be shown Saturday, May 7th, at 7 PM and Sunday, May 8th, at 2 PM , and the FEATURES will screen Saturday, May 7th, at 9 PM and Sunday, May 8th, at 5 PM .
Highlights of shorts program Saturday, May 7th, 7PM: Ken Jacobs’ Jonas Mekas in Kodachrome Days, using innovative digital techniques to transform Mekas into 3D motion;Coleen Fitzgibbons’s L.E.S. (Lower East Side), a fable about a parallel Manhattan and its mammon-worshiping inhabitants; and Peter Cramer’s Coney Island, a haunting study of a once-famous amusement park.
Feature program Saturday, May 7th, 9 PM: filmgoers can view Rachel Amodeo’s What About Me, the story of a young homeless woman who is slowly deteriorating on the streets of the Lower East Side, including footage of the homeless shanty-town that existed in Tompkins Square Park from 1989 to 1990.
Highlights of shorts program Sunday, May 8th, 2PM: Shirley Clarke’s Bridges-Go-Round, a classic masterpiece of undulating man-made urban constructions; Henry Hills’s Money, a meditation on the economic problems facing New York avant-garde artists; and Donna Cameron’s Broken Bridge, a collage of deconstructed hand-drawn images of the iconic Brooklyn Bridge, using Cameron’s own patented invention, paper emulsion.
Feature program Sunday, May 8th, 5 PM: Phillip Hartman and Doris Kornish’s filmic love letter to the Lower East Side’s pre-gentrification days, No Picnic, features the diverse, off-beat, and often insane characters representing the various subcultures that once defined the neighborhood. Look for an early performance by Steve Buscemi as a dead pimp.
These programs are produced in collaboration with the New Museum as part of the Festival of Ideas for the New City, a major new collaborative initiative in New York involving scores of Downtown organizations working together to harness the power of the creative community to imagine the future city and explore ideas that will shape it. The Festival will include a three-day slate of symposia; an innovative StreetFest along the Bowery; and over eighty independent projects and public events.